On Friday 15 February 2002 01:39 pm, Brandon D. Valentine wrote: > On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Ian Eure wrote: > > >Anyways... can you divulge how I'd get this running, or suggest a better > >solution? It seems silly to stick 6 DAT tapes (24gb) in a tape cartridge that > >has to be swapped out every day when the daily incremental backups aren't > >breaking 250mb. I'm completely open to alternate solutions if you can suggest > >one. > > Umm, excuse me if I'm being rude, but duh. You stick 6 DAT tapes in the > cartridge on Monday, and let Amanda use /one/ tape each night. It > automatically gets a full set of level 0 dumps over the course of the > week, as well as incrementals every night. This is what amanda is > designed to do and it works damned well. I use 10 35GB AIT tapes per > two weeks to backup my data and I see amanda getting a full set of level > 0s done every three days or so, plus incrementals every night. Amanda > is not a traditional backup system where you get full dumps weekly and > incrementals every night. Amanda is designed to minimize time between > full dumps, so you can get them more than once a week, and to insure > that you always have incrementals to restore to any day within the > dumpcycle. It is also designed to fill up your tapes. You should never > be putting 250mb on a 24gb tape. You should always be putting 24gb on > the tape. Amanda will do this for you. > Sorry for being ignorant. Frankly, I'm completely lost trying to get Amanda set up properly. As I said, I have zero experience with Amanda, and this type of network backup in general. I've read through what Amanda documentation I can find (not much) and it hasn't explained the "Amanda Way" of doing backups. If you can point me to some reasonable documentation which explains things better, /please/ do - I'll go read it all before I bother you again.
Let's recap: Last Sunday, I did a full dump onto 6 blank tapes. Monday, swapped the cartridge out for 6 new tapes. Monday's backups went fine. Tuesday through yesterday, I got this error: "*** A TAPE ERROR OCCURRED: [new tape not found in rack]. Some dumps may have been left in the holding disk. Run amflush to flush them to tape. The next 6 tapes Amanda expects to used are: a new tape, a new tape, a new tape, a new tape, a new tape, a new tape." The backups are sitting in my backup spool directory. I've run amlabel on all the tapes in all the caddies. Amanda is configured to use my changer thusly: -- snip -- runtapes 6 # explained in WHATS.NEW tpchanger "chg-zd-mtx" # the tape-changer glue script, see TAPE.CHANGERS changerdev "/dev/sg0" tapetype HP-CHANGER labelstr "^GH-((I)?(F)?)-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9]$" -- snip -- And for rotations: -- snip -- dumpcycle 1 weeks # the number of days in the normal dump cycle tapecycle 7 tapes # the number of tapes in rotation bumpsize 20 MB # minimum savings (threshold) to bump level 1 -> 2 bumpdays 1 # minimum days at each level bumpmult 4 # threshold = bumpsize * (level-1)**bumpmult -- snip -- Now, can you please tell me why Amanda isn't flushing the backups? Should I set the tapecycle to, say, two? Excuse me if I'm being rude, but I'd much rather be told how to do things the right way instead of being told over and over that I'm doing it wrong.
